Not surprisingly, Reza Nazari did not sleep well that last night in Vienna, and neither did Gabriel. He passed it in the safe flat in the Second District, in the company of Christopher Keller and Eli Lavon. Lisbon was never far from his thoughts: the dreary little apartment in the Bairro Alto, the vines spilling from Quinn’s balcony, the attractive woman of perhaps thirty whom he followed to London’s Brompton Road. Lisbon had been a master performance staged for his benefit, and Gabriel had responded by crafting a story of his own—a story of radioactive material gone missing and of a legendary spy gone to an early grave. The final act would play out tomorrow night in Hamburg, and the star of the show would be Reza Nazari. It was a great deal of responsibility to place upon the shoulders of a mortal enemy, but Gabriel had no other choice. Nazari was the road that led to Alexei Rozanov, ally of the Russian president, patron of Eamon Quinn. The man who could make a ball of fire travel a thousand feet per second. The man who had been at a terrorist training camp in Libya with Tariq al-Hourani. No, he thought as he watched snow falling gently over Vienna, he would not sleep tonight.

The computer was his only companion. He reread the British dossier on Alexei Rozanov and reviewed the photos from Copenhagen. The Russian had arrived a few minutes late that evening, which, according to Nazari, was his custom. Two SVR bodyguards had surreptitiously followed him into the restaurant, and a third had remained with the car. It was a local acquisition, a big Mercedes sedan, Danish registration. The driver had waited on a quiet side street until Alexei Rozanov summoned him with a phone call at the end of the meal. The Russian had left the restaurant alone in order to preserve the illusion that he was not a man under full-time physical protection.

Dawn arrived late that last morning in Vienna, and it never got properly light outside. Gabriel and Keller left the safe flat a few minutes after eight o’clock and took a taxi to the airport. They checked in separately for the morning flight to Hamburg and upon arrival rode in a pair of taxis to the same spot on the Mönckebergstrasse, Hamburg’s main shopping street. From there they walked together from the old city to the new—and from somewhere in the depths of his memory, Gabriel recalled that Hamburg had more canals and bridges than Amsterdam and Venice combined.

“What about St. Petersburg?” asked Keller.

“I wouldn’t know,” said Gabriel with a tense smile.

The street called Hohe Bleichen stretched from the Marriott Hotel to the fringes of the busy Axel-Springer-Platz. It was part Bond Street and part Rodeo Drive; it was modern Germany at its prosperous best. Ralph Lauren occupied a wedding cake of a building at the northern end. Prada and Dibbern china stood shoulder to shoulder a little farther to the south. And next to the luxury shoemaker Ludwig Reiter was Die Bank, the marble temple of dining so beloved by Hamburg’s financial and commercial elite. Red banners with the restaurant’s scribble of an insignia hung from the facade. Sculpted pillars guarded its entrance.

By then, it was a few minutes after one p.m., and the running battle of the lunch rush was at its most pitched. Gabriel entered alone and found a place at the gold-plated bar. He forced himself to drink a glass of rosé while he reacquainted himself with the sight lines of the restaurant’s interior. Then he paid his bill in cash and went into the street again. It was narrow, with only a handful of parking spaces. The traffic flow was north to south. Directly opposite the restaurant was a tiny triangular esplanade where Keller sat on the edge of a concrete planter. Gabriel joined him.

“Well?” he asked.

“Nice place,” answered Keller.

“For what?”

“Anything you decide.” Keller looked up the length of the street. “These exclusive shops all close early. At nine o’clock this place will be very quiet. At eleven it’ll be dead.” He glanced at Gabriel and added, “No pun intended.”

Gabriel was silent.

“It’s five steps from the entrance of the restaurant to the curb,” said Keller. “I could put him down from right here and be gone before his body hit the concrete.”

“So could I,” answered Gabriel. “But it’s possible I might need to go over a couple of small points with him first.”

“Quinn?”

Gabriel rose without another word and led Keller southward across the Neustadt to St. Michael’s Church. In the shadow of its soaring clock tower was a green park surrounded by stubby apartment houses. They entered one, a modern building with a smoked-glass atrium, and rode the elevator to the fourth floor. Gabriel knocked lightly on the door of 4D, and a tall academic-looking man named Yossi Gavish admitted them. Rimona Stern and Dina Sarid were peering into the screens of laptop computers at the dining room table, and in the sitting room Mordecai and Oded, a pair of all-purpose field hands, were leaning over a large-scale map of Hamburg. Dina looked up and smiled, but otherwise no one acknowledged Gabriel’s presence as he entered. He removed his coat and went to the window. The clock tower of St. Michael’s told him it was ten minutes past two o’clock. It was good to be home again, he thought. It was good to be alive.

51

PICCADILLY, LONDON

IN LONDON IT WAS TEN minutes past one, and Yuri Volkov was running a few minutes behind schedule. Officially, Volkov held a low-level post in the consular section of the Russian Embassy. In reality, he was a senior operative at the SVR’s London rezidentura, second only to the rezident himself, Dmitry Ulyanin. British intelligence knew the true nature of his work, and he was the target of regular physical surveillance by MI5. For the better part of an hour, Volkov had been attempting to shake a two-person team from A4, a man and a woman posing as husband and wife. Now, as he moved along the crowded pavements of Piccadilly, he was confident he was finally alone.

The Russian crossed Regent Street and ducked into the Piccadilly Circus Underground station. The station sat astride both the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines. Volkov fed a prepaid fare card through the scanner and made his way down the escalator to the Bakerloo platform. And there he spotted the asset, a weak-chinned balding man in his late forties wearing a department-store suit and a mackintosh coat. He was the sort of man that young women instinctively avoided on the Underground. And with good reason, thought Volkov, for young girls were his vice. The SVR had found one for him, a child of thirteen from some shithole in Siberia, and they’d fed her to him on a plate. And now they owned him. He was a mere cog in the vast machine of intelligence, but important matters routinely crossed his desk. He had requested a crash meeting, which meant that in all likelihood he had an important piece of intelligence to pass along.

An overhead sign flashed to indicate the approach of a northbound train. The man in the mackintosh moved to the edge of the platform and Volkov, ten paces to the left, did the same. They stared straight ahead, each into a private space, as the train eased into the station and expelled a crowd of passengers. Then both men entered the same carriage through different doors. The man in the mackintosh sat, but Volkov remained standing. He moved to within five feet of the man, an appropriate distance for secure transmission, and seized hold of a handrail. As the train lurched forward, the man in the mackintosh removed a smart phone, thumbed the touchscreen a few times, and then returned the phone to his pocket. Ten seconds later the device in Volkov’s breast pocket pulsated three times, which meant the information had been transmitted successfully. And then it was done. No dead drops, no face-to-face meetings, and it was all entirely secure. Even if MI5 managed to capture the spy’s phone, there would be no trace of the activity.